World shocked to learn J.D. Salinger was still alive
The world awoke to news that author J.D. Salinger, who wrote the novel Catcher in the Rye, a book most well-known for featuring as a plot point in 
the moderately unsuccessful American film Conspiracy Theory, had died.
This was followed by an outpouring of surprise over the news that Salinger had still been alive.
“I mean, holy hell, you talk about Salinger in the same sentence as F. Scott Fitgerald or Mark Twain,” said Literary critic William H. Gass. “It’s almost automatic to think he’s just as dead as those two guys.”
Academic Louis Menand noted, “Salinger didn’t die . . . I mean, like way back, cause he obviously did die or we wouldn’t be talking about this . . . anyhoo . . . Salinger didn’t die. He just went so far off the deep end in the 1950s that he might as well have been dead for the next six decades.”
The Guiness Book of World Records holds that Salinger was the record holder for “Longest Time as Recluse Without Mailing a Bomb to a Government Official or Agency, or a Non-Profit Liberal Group Perceived as ‘One of Them’”.
Gass added in his statement, “I mean, the other day when I heard Howard Zinn had died, that registered. You know, because people had talked about him like he still alive some time after the Johnson administration.”
Canadian readers may best remember Salinger from an incident in 1960, when he attempted to unilaterally annex part of southern Quebec to his Vermont summer vacation home. The effort ended in September 1960 after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police foiled a poorly-conceived suicide by cop Salinger had hoped to attempt with help from an imaginary friend. Salinger remained bitter for decades after the incident, insisting his imaginary friend had abandoned him.
